Heal Our Land

I have not known my artistry. I have only been an artist. 

I was what I was before I knew what I was. 

Religion is what is what influenced my development as a person and as an artist the most - toxic religion, and true religion, and the conflict between the two - Jacob wrestling with the angel for his blessing. 

That has been my struggle, and my glory. 

I believe the psychology of parenting is central to art - the psychology of personhood. 

It is also central to religion. This is why art and religion battle each other in our world. They want to collude, yet they will not. They want to make friends. They want to be as one.  But they cannot be. Yet maybe they are the same person, Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. 

The psychology of our culture is split in this way. The heart of the children are separated from the fathers, and fathers from the children. 

Only when religion comes searching for art, will art answer her again. 

But she has not. Only when the fathers come searching for the children, will they answer them again. 

“And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” 

Only when the hearts of the fathers turn to the children and the children to the fathers, then will the land be healed. 

Otherwise cursing. 

It is the art of becoming. It is the separation from violence. It is the new beginnings. It is the sharing of the births and rebirths. 

The question of, what is true fathering and mothering? What is true nurturing? What makes a person become? And what is stifling to that becoming? 

My mind has been occupied with these definitions for the last 20 years, perhaps my whole life. I am 36.   

Our culture plays to the tune of the orphan and the slavemaster. Those who were supposed to be fathers have become slavemasters, sacrificing children to their enterprises. 

The children become orphans. 

Then orphans begat orphans. 

Children come to school just to have a meal, and the parents are children themselves. 

Substances make them incoherent over the phone. 

The smartest and strongest children become the parents and sacrifice their own futures. Never seen a day of hope in their lives, and every summer is hotter than the last. And every child hears the gun and the life that it takes and they come to school telling me, "Ms. Hooker, we might laugh. But everybody grieves their own way." And I understood. 

And those who would be protected by the fathers have been left on the street of poverty, identity theft, and blame, fending for themselves. But what we have not seen, what we have not heard, what we have not found, is sacrificial love. 

And then there are the elderly ones, not in age, but in linage. 

Those on this land, that made this land, that are this land.    

I was in Utah. And we built a home for a grandmother. Her name was Lorraine Nakai. I heard a story about oil. Rich oil. Hidden oil. Oil in the ground. Oil on the land of those who had been exiled to this land because it was assumed bad land, really the worst. So they were exiled. 

And then they found water, rather oil. 

But then the fathers came.   

And the land became a pipeline for politics. And the schools shut down. And the water shut down. And the life blood was reduced to a small trickle. But they held on. The people held on. Their feeble lawsuits were met with feeble answers. And on and on. In 2011. In 2011!!!!  

The oil is shipped to another state, to another tribe. The land of the oil does not profit from it. The grandmothers and the grandfathers do not profit from it. Neither do the children. The grandchildren are forced to leave what they love.

That is how the fathers treat the orphans and the grandparents. 

How can our land be healed? Because the fathers want to eat the children.      

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” The first part makes sense. But what of the second? Not separate like a cult or a commune, but separate rather from the commerce and the prostitution. That is what separation is, will be. Has to be. It is about this: Is it prostitution or personhood? 

Because orphans are only orphans if they are bought and sold and bartered for as slaves first, and then thrown out because they are no longer profitable. 

Where we treat persons as commodities is where we lose our humanity, and our family, and our nation. 

When we treat all the orphans as sons and daughters, and all the grandparents as sages, that is when we will heal our land, and not a second sooner. Not a second before. 

So, I am concerned with land – with oil, with settlement, with political land. So, I am concerned with building. And out of that, I am concerned with saying something by building, with architecture.